logbook/content/posts/first-attempt.md

title	date	author	tags
Automating Hugo Deployment with Gitea Actions	2025-02-27	Dev	gitea ci/cd hugo

Recently, I tried setting up Gitea Actions to automatically update my Hugo blog whenever I pushed new content. The idea was simple:

• Use Gitea’s built-in CI/CD to pull the repo,
• Build the site using Hugo,
• Deploy it to the server.

Setting Up Gitea Actions

First, I created a .gitea/workflows/deploy.yml file with the following steps:

name: Deploy Hugo Site

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Clone repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Install Hugo
        run: |
          sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y hugo

      - name: Build site
        run: hugo -D

      - name: Deploy to server
        run: |
          scp -r public/* user@server:/var/www/html/

Authentication Issues 😩

To deploy, I needed SSH access to the server. Gitea doesn’t have built-in secrets management (like GitHub Actions), so I had to hardcode my SSH private key inside the workflow.

I knew this wasn't ideal, but I just wanted to get it working first. Unfortunately, after multiple attempts, it still failed with permission denied (publickey) errors.

What's Next? 🤔

Instead of fighting with Gitea Actions, I decided to try something else. In my next post, I'll explain how I switched to a simpler, more reliable approach using a sync service.